Fright
by Blueberry-Valentine
Summary: Kira doesn't love L. But Light does. Sometimes he finds it hard to distinguish the difference between the two. L/Light.


Takes place after the helicopter/Higuchi/return of memories scene, but before Light and Misa get set free...which, kind of doesn't work with the timeline, but pretend there was an extra night squeezed in there for me.

Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note.

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They are lying in bed, one with a single pillow slipped under his head and his back relatively straight, and the other leaning against a tower of three pillows and curling his lanky body into a tucked position on his side. This is usual, normal, typical, characteristic, routine, and Light flips through his internal thesaurus for several more words, if only to distract himself from the fact that all of this is unusual, abnormal, untypical, uncharacteristic, and an arrantly gross divergence from routine.

A pale, spindly hand reaches out to his shoulder and it takes every ounce of strength for him to stay still. He is disgusted by how muddled his mind has become at a single touch in a dark room and how equally his arm wants to swing a fist at the body behind him and pull it into a tight, never ending embrace.

"What's wrong?"

The question comes as a set of fingers walking its way up his neck. Goosebumps rise in their wake and he loathes that he cannot make them sink back down.

"The shinigami."

This is a lie, a blatant lie, but Light already screamed in the helicopter and he must use that lie as long as he can, even if it is a severe blow to his image.

"Everyone has fears; I suppose mine is of shinigami," he'd chuckled earlier that night, when the detective had mentioned Light's scream to the rest of the investigative team. They had laughed blithely along with him, accepting this false flaw in the nearly perfect young man. But Light isn't just a young man; he is a _god_ and gods are perfect.

However, maybe he hasn't completed the transformation into a god, because it doesn't seem that he's mastered the art of being a perfect liar. The cool touch on his throat stills and the absolute silence in the room is shouting betrayal, treachery, disloyalty, deceit, perfidy.

"You're frightened."

The whisper isn't an inquiry or an accusation or a verification; it is a conclusion, uttered as simply as the answer to a single digit addition problem. Umbrage rolls through his shoulders; his self-esteem doesn't take kindly to the suggestion that _the_Yagami Light is afraid of a mere shinigami with attachment issues.

Light represses his indignation; this has the potential to turn into a tricky situation and he can't let his admittedly large ego get in the way of his acting abilities.

"Yes," he answers simply.

"But not of the shinigami," the man continues calmly, always a detective, even when lying in bed in the middle of the night with his secret lover. This deduction comes as effortlessly as the last, leaving Light furious and hating the cool, calm, collected, composed air that travels along the words. Emotion is a weakness and sometimes Light wonders if that is why the young man is so strong.

Presently, he is so deeply loathing how utterly _not _weak his opponent is that it startles him when the next sentence breaks at the end.

"What's wrong, Light-kun?"

It doesn't escape Light's notice that his name is the word that cracks. A quiet fills the room with electric surprise so strong that Light knows the detective is also stunned by the weakness he has shown.

But the man is more persistent than self-conscious and he continues: "Light-kun? What's wrong? Tell me. Tell me what's wrong, Light."

His sanity splintering, Light whirls around, if only to make the man stop saying his name. He can utter the teen's name so casually, intimately, while Light doesn't even know what to call him anymore: L? Ryuzaki? Ryuga Hideki? Eraldo Coil? Deneuve?

He doesn't know what he intends to do, as any physical manifestations of his inner turmoil would surely be more destructive than necessary, but the fingers of one hand still lock around the white fabric of the front of the man's shirt. "Ryuzaki," he begins through gritted teeth, the word bubbling up without the slightest idea of where it is going. That ends up not mattering, though, as the collision of their mouths doesn't give it the chance to.

Light didn't initiate the kiss and it shocks him so thoroughly that he responds on instinct. His grip on the man's shirt changes, turns from angry and belligerent to desperate and possessive. Long fingers curl in his hair, pull him closer, confuse him and urge him on. Only when tongues touch and cloth is rucked up does he realize it.

This is _wrong_: gnashed teeth and rampant shivers and spider fingers and panda eyes and mistaken heart attacks and a script that they can't stray from.

However, for every aspect that makes him want to retch, there's another that makes him glow with such intensity that he is surprised Watari hasn't noticed beams shooting out from under the door yet, and reconsider, and notice just how _right _this is: nipping teeth and delighted shivers and dancing fingers and heady eyes and happily traded hearts and a script that they simply don't want to stray from.

But disregarding whether this is right or wrong, Light cannot believe that he has let this happen. Everything had been planned out so thoroughly, so meticulously, so perfectly, and he had to go and ruin every moment of that careful preparation and fall in love with the very man he was going to defeat.

That is what frightens him: falling head over heels for the aforementioned man. Light cannot properly be Kira when he is emotionally involved in this way. A part of him considers that the detective planned this entire liaison for the sole purpose of bewildering the justice seeking Kira out of him.

But then their shirts are off, hanging on the string of chain between them like unmentionables on a clothesline, and the key is being fumbled for and snaps are unsnapping and zippers are unzipping and that suspicion is just about the last thing on his mind, hovering in the very back with Misa and the dust under the bed and whether or not there is watermelon in the kitchen.

An hour later they are still in bed, but now Light is lying on his back, staring at the dark ceiling and pretending that he can see the outline of the light bulb so that he can distract himself from the fact that his mind is too clouded to even rest; and the world's three best detectives is snoring at his side, messy ebony hair sticking up in every direction possible and impossible, for that matter, defying gravity the way that only it can do. The man sighs contentedly and curls closer to Light's bare torso, losing his innocent façade in sleep, but somehow looking even more harmless and, dare he say, endearing as he unconsciously rather than subconsciously brings his thumb to his teeth.

Light jerks his head away from the sight, snapping his jaws together with the finality of a guillotine. This has to end: _now_.

He is Kira and this is L. Tomorrow he will tell the eccentric man, somehow, though it seems so impossible and ridiculous and unfeasible that the mere concept is surreal, and they will go back to being no more than the suspecting and the suspected under the thin guise of coworkers and he will see Misa more frequently and he will eventually marry her and rule with her and have children with her and love her and—

No.

He can't do it.

The more he plans, the stronger and more intolerable the ache in the left side of his chest grows. This isn't a one night stand, a brief high school fling, a business matter disguised as a relationship. This is something _more_:more indelible than the dark circles under endless onyx eyes, more binding than the manacles locking them together, more delectable than the finest confectionaries, more ideal than the world that Kira is trying to create.

He _can't do it_ and no, no, no, the realization is crashing down on him like a raging stream of tipping dominoes; he still loves him and he can't for the life of him figure out how to stop.

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First Death Note fanfiction. Reviews=love.


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